Even more fun: I was working on an unholy bash script that had a long curly brace block, and I was wondering why none of the environment variables survived.

Then I noticed, tucked away at the end:

      ...
      kill --all humans
      touch $children
      fork yourself
    } | log

Because, you see, components of a pipeline have to be run in subshells...

I was about to comment about how it took me several reads and then finally reading the "compound commands" section of `BASH(1)` to recognize the use of `(` vs `{` in the examples. That distinction should have been made clear in the example IMO.

Why? () is the obvious way to get an independent subshell. I guess it's annoying if you're not used to the distinction, but it's not hard. Is it really not common knowledge?

Because it parses, visually, EXTREMELY similarly to `{` in a place where almost everybody who programs in a brace-y language will expect a brace.

Thus most people will not notice it unless you point it out very explicitly, and it has the potential to cause great confusion.